Selfish local parking & poor lorry route choice

Reported in the Car parking category anonymously at 17:15, Mon 11 September 2017

Sent to Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council 5 minutes later

This is a two way street that is always cut down to one lane by a multitude of parked cars. Appallingly self-serving behaviour by residents - park elsewhere.

Cars are forced to wait to pass in normal circumstances, and there are several sections of parked cars along the road, meaning it can take 15 mins to get from Mill St. to Wateringbury Rd.

And that's just normal circumstances. In exceptional circumstances, lorries and wide vehicles cause holdups and minor bumps & dings when trying to squeeze through past traffic.

This can mean there are queues and gridlock for as much time as it takes for one idiot to squeeze his lorry past and/or sort out insurance details. I ended up doing a u-turn and a half-hour detour after sitting still for 20 minutes the other day.

There is no reason for a lorry or other wide vehicle to use this route. None whatsoever.

Any nearby town is accessible via the A20, A228 and A26. Any village location enclosed by these A-Roads is perfectly easy to access using a van, and the onus should be on delivery companies to accept the (relatively very small) financial cost of using unsuitable roads, rather than force road users to pay with their time.

10 minutes saved for the lorry driver is (for example) 25 x 10 minutes (ie 4 hours 10 mins) of total journey time lost for everyone else. How is this not illegal? it defies all logic. Call me, I'll write the law myself, in my free time...

I'd say that the Council should take the following actions, immediately:

Forbid any parking on the East end of Mill St, all of the High St and Chapel St, and the north end of Wateringbury Rd.

Place restrictions on wide or slow vehicles, from New Rd (junction with chapman way), south, for all of High St, Chapel St and Wateringbury Rd down to Wateringbury village itself (where a roundabout really needs to be added instead of the lights) - also including Mill St. from East Malling to Mill Street town.

Initiate the enactment of legislation meaning that haulage companies cannot profiteer at the expense of road users. It shouldn't be up to haulage companies to decide whether they can use a road or not, as they are motivated by profit and will not take into account other road users.